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Thursday, October 11, 2012

College Stinks

When I graduated high school, I thought that I was set to go to college to become a mechanical engineer. I found CADD to be very interesting and I always found it much easier than most of my classmates did. But once I got to college the classes were just awful. I didn't get to any engineering classes but all of the standard college classes were dreary and painful. I switched to a business major in order to, hopefully, get out quicker. (4 out of 40 of what would have been my mechanical engineering class had a job a year later.)

Prior to college I was energetically ready to go to work, but while at college I got lazy. And I found the classes to be mostly stupid.

A marketing class consists of things that are mostly obvious. If you want to sell stuff to senior citizens, don't advertise on Cartoon Network. If you are going to do business in a foreign country, then you should know their customs so that you don't offend anyone. etc.

An accounting class was about accounting laws. Human Resources is about knowing all of the labor laws.

Required classes on how to use a computer seem quite silly when we are all college students and almost certainly needed to know how a computer works just to sign up for the classes. Having it as an optional class would not seem as stupid.

The woman's studies classes were quite bad too. Even though I did not get to "learn from" the black feminist that many of my roommates dreaded. At the college I went to we got to rent our books from the school and their cost was included in the tuition. I remember going to collect my books for one of my required women's studies classes and seeing "Pride and Prejudice" on one of the shelves. I thought that maybe the class would be okay. But then I looked at my list and saw "The Da Vinci Code," something my Maya Angelou, and other crap including something about a ladyboy. What they essentially told me was that I needed to stop reading the books I was reading (at the time: Jane Austen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Atlas Shrugged, etc) and pick up some modern popular crap.

I wish I had skipped the day when the transvestite was a guest speaker. Instead of hiding behind the person in front of me and thinking, "I don't want to know. I don't want to know...I'm going to be sick."

(Note: I have nothing against lesbians or gays, except their politics; but transvestites are disgusting.)

Then we come to the economics classes that I was required to take. I find economics to be fascinating. When I first read "Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell I thought that economics was the study of why I was correct politically. But in the economic classes that I took we "learned" things like how Henry Ford caused the Great Depression by lowering the wages of his workers, or some such crap. (Read The Wild Wheel by Garet Garrett to see that, if anything, the opposite is true.) I noticed that two of my economics teachers wrote their own [unreadable] textbooks.

And business classes are a waste of time. We were told to have group projects and create business plans. Being in a group, of course, means that you either do all of the work or almost none. I thought that the highlight was always when the other groups presented their ideas to the class. "We're going to project our stupid business will have $10 million in sales the first year and grow by $5 million every year thereafter."

So of course when I first decided to plan my own business, I went straight to creating a business plan like I was taught. My plan will be very useful when I go to the bank for a loan, which I won't get because I have no existing business. The correct way to start is to start small. And if you have success while very small, then you might create a formal plan and get a loan, if necessary.

I can honestly say that I've learned more about running a business from reading a handful of books and a few things on the internet, than I have learned from business school. (I've probably learned more about running a business from playing Sim City, then I have from school.)